Drop, Ocean

I love this quote, attributed to Sir Isaac Newton: What we know is a drop; what we don’t know is an ocean. The image is well-chosen. Compared to a mere drop, the ocean is vastly, unfathomably larger. Not only that, the drop would utterly, unrecognizably disappear within the ocean. This lends itself well to revisiting and putting into perspective a favorite model, the circle of competence. That is useful, but of course only a view about a single person. If we compared one person’s competence with everyone’s, it might look like something like the following. Of course Euler diagrams visualize relationships, not scale. The following almost certainly also does not show the proper scale, but perhaps it gives a better idea of the differences. Understand these not as two-dimensional, but actually as multi-dimensional spaces, here only reduced in resolution for purposes of simple visualization. Our quote from the beginning went further, drawing the distinction between what we collectively know…